


The Sweetest, Dorkiest Love

by ceilingfan5



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Baking, Dorks in Love, Established Relationship, Fluff, Food, Gift Giving, Holidays, Love, M/M, Sweet, Valentine's Day, Valentine's Day Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:54:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22776742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceilingfan5/pseuds/ceilingfan5
Summary: Anxious about giving Taako the perfect Valentine's present, Kravitz trades Lup two weeks of night shifts so she'll teach him how to make chocolates. It doesn't go as planned, but love wins out anyway.
Relationships: Kravitz/Taako (The Adventure Zone)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 120





	The Sweetest, Dorkiest Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [terezis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/terezis/gifts).



> Inspired by this post by Terezis on tumblr!! https://terezis.tumblr.com/post/190814540614 This is for you, Ginny! Everybody else is allowed to enjoy it, though. Also it's still Valentine's /month/, so it still counts, right? 
> 
> Please leave a comment if you enjoyed these boys in l-o-v-e!!!

Holidays freak Kravitz out. 

He’s old, is the thing, and time passes differently for him than it does for mere mortals. They used to be a nuisance to him, nothing more. Why would he bother to celebrate something that would be over in the blink of an eye, something that would get in the way of his duty to his Queen? Why bother taking time to eat special food or go to a party or...laughably, give and receive gifts? Who would he give a present to, a necromantic cult? _I know your hands are fantasy zip-tied together, but please accept this offering of my appreciation for not using Disintegrate on me when I showed up to kick your sorry asses. I really like this suit._

And then Taako happened. 

That’s the other thing. He tends to split his life, well, his existence, into Before Taako and After Taako, now. In a way, they’re very similar--he still serves the Raven Queen, still busts the bad guys, still rounds up rogue souls and locks ‘em in the pokey for eternity and a half. But in every other aspect, it’s so different it makes him cry sometimes, which is its own example of how wildly the tables have rotated. Before Taako, he wouldn’t bother to eat, had no friends or other relationships, had no interest in the temperature of his hands. Before Taako, he didn’t do a lot of smiling, only laughed at his own jokes, played games with his bounties just to feel something. 

After Taako, things are completely different. The world is literally more colorful again. He has a boyfriend, an honest-to-the-gods boyfriend, whom he ADORES, whom he spoils the shit out of, who makes him smile and laugh and cry and feed cats and buy hand-warming packets and, whether he wants to believe it or not, celebrate holidays. 

Taako makes his heart beat again. Taako makes the sun worth seeing, the battles worth surviving, the food worth eating. Taako makes his soul stir and remember that it belongs to a person and ought to be treated like one, for fuck’s sake. It’s hard. It’s hard as hell, and sometimes it hurts, feeling like a person again, but it’s worth it. It’s so, so worth it. 

Even when that feeling is _severe anxiety._

Not only is Valentine’s Day a gift-giving holiday, it’s a romantic one. It’s like a trial specifically designed to ruin Kravitzes. Fancy meals? Presents? Romance??? He has no experience in such matters, or, if he did, it was so long ago he could have hauled off and personally decked the real St. Valentine in the face for coming up with such nonsense. It’s not that he isn’t excited to spend time with his love and be ooey gooey and have a Good Time and probably eat a meal Taako labored over for hours with _cookbooks_ and _ingredients._ He’s just afraid of fucking up and making Taako miserable because he Valentined bad. Which is a terrible, extremely possible fate. 

He does the only thing he can think of and ambushes Lup the next time they’re working together. 

“I’ll trade you two weeks of night shifts if you help me make the best valentine ever,” he says, entirely breathless. It does not sound as nice as it did when he practiced it in the mirror a dozen times, and his stomach squirms when she raises her perfect eyebrows at him. 

“You want me to help you impress my brother?”

“Please,” Kravitz whispers, very close to begging. “I don’t know what to do. I was going to do one of those big teddy bears, but he bought himself one when we went grocery shopping, and I thought about doing something intimate but I didn’t know where to start, and-”

“Hold up, cowboy.” Lup pops her bubblegum that she definitely shouldn’t have on a mission and folds her arms. The necromancer she’s hog-tied tries to wriggle away, but she steps on the rope and freezes him in place with a serious blast of magic. “First of all, I don’t want to even hear you say the word intimate again. Second of all, he’s full of shit. He’s not that hard to impress. Third of all, you’re going to give me a month of night shifts, because I’m going to teach you how to make the perfect gift and he’s going to fall in love with you all over again.”

“Yes ma’am.” 

“Then let’s clean this shit show up tout suite so I can teach you how to make Romance Chocolate.”

Lup makes him do all the paperwork. 

Romance Chocolate is both exactly what Kravitz anticipated and also a saccharine, hellish nightmare. There are lots of ways to make chocolate--for one, it doesn’t actually start with _making the chocolate_ , but rather taking existing chocolate and making it cuter, or adding things for flavor, or shaping it, or ruining the hell out of it in the microwave and spending ten consecutive minutes hiding in the bathroom even though you don’t physically have to do that, you just can’t look her in the face while she scrapes burny bits out of her good Pyrex and sighs pointedly. 

The first few tries don’t go so well. The next few tries are edible, but hideous, or beautiful, but poisonous. Kravitz has a teeny-weeny little breakdown, because Taako is a professional chef, and he deserves better, and if Kravitz can’t handle melting fucking chocolate and landing it in a mold and decorating it, does Kravitz even deserve Taako? Lup takes pity on him and they share some sympathy ice cream on her couch for a while, the smell of burnt chocolate still hanging in the air. 

“You’re getting better,” she says, her tone placating. 

“It’s just not good enough.”

“Pan on a bike, man, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to taste good, okay? Taako’s a mortal man. He likes chocolate. He also has an ego bigger than the astral plane, and he’ll be fuckin’ delighted you made him something with your hands and your time. I’m gonna tell you again, because clearly it did not get through your skull the first time, despite all appearances, he is not that difficult to impress.” 

She pats him on the shoulder. He eats another large spoonful of ice cream and wishes it hadn’t defrosted, because all of the cookie dough pieces are at the bottom. It’s all rather pitiful, and Lup doesn’t have a lot of patience for it, and she yanks him right back into the saddle for one more attempt. 

“Just don’t fuck it up,” she says, extremely helpfully. 

It doesn’t come out...deadly. And it isn’t completely hideous. For a moment, Kravitz is even kind of proud. The dried strawberries look sort of like a heart if you squint, and the fat bloom on the chocolate isn’t that noticeable. Lup delicately let him give up on tempering the chocolate when he started to pull his hair out, so it was always going to be an it-is-what-it-is situation. They even force it out of the molds and into a cute little paper box that he can tie with a pink ribbon, and Kravitz is actually feeling pretty okay about it all.

“See?” Lup claps him in the back and then laughs, licking her fingers. “What did I say? It wasn’t that hard.”

Kravitz isn’t sure he’ll ask Lup to teach him something again, but he thanks her respectfully and takes his chocolate home.

Which gives him enough time to completely overthink the whole thing, panic about his chocolate not being good enough or pretty enough, stress that he’s insulting his boyfriend’s skill and professional standing by trying to feed him such garbage, and give up on the whole enterprise after all. When he gets inside, he thanks his lucky stars that Taako isn’t home yet and shoves the chocolate in the back of the fridge, behind the bok choy and mustard, where it shall never be seen again by unseasoned eyes. He’ll take it to work tomorrow, he decides. Barry can eat it, or something. Maybe he can burn it as an offering--he’s certainly good enough at that. 

It’s Valentine’s Eve and he’s present-less. Taako’s teddy-bear stares at him judgmentally from the couch, and Kravitz sticks his tongue out at it. Stupid bastard self-gift. It would have been so easy to get one of those. Next year, he’ll have to be on the ball a lot sooner.

Next year. Even in the throes of his private hissy-fit, Kravitz has to stop to be gay. He’s in love. He wants to be with Taako next year, wants to survive a whole host of holidays to keep being with him. Kravitz wants to keep this relationship forever. He smiles to himself, relieved he’s not just going through all this because he’s crazy. He’s just really, really in love. Surely something can show that to Taako. Just not the goddamn chocolates. 

It’s Valentine’s Day and Kravitz is fucked, and not in the romantic way. Without the chocolates he’d been planning on, he has nothing for Taako. And NOTHING is a lot worse than a shitty thing. Taako loves things. Kravitz doesn’t want Taako to think he forgot about him, or worse, didn’t care. He tenderizes his brain for any little clue, any possible hint of a thing he could not fuck up that Taako would appreciate. 

Cupcakes. Taako makes cupcakes all the time, and he makes them look so easy. How hard could they be?

Turns out: very hard. Very, very, very, very, very hard. Kravitz takes the day off and turns the kitchen into a warzone. He neglected to put an apron on until halfway through, and he’s almost certain his suit is going to be permanently stained. Something about gel food coloring is above the reach of even the most skilled arcanist. 

Kravitz makes a big fucking mess, and yet, somehow, he ends up with twenty-four (admittedly sunken and lumpy) mini pastelles. He forgets to wait for them to cool and frosts them too soon, and then the butter in the buttercream melts and streams down the sides. He also forgot the dumb little papers they go in, so he has a hell of a time getting them out of the fucking tin. Kravitz ends up with five un-hideous, un-burnt cupcakes, and he delicately places them on one of their good plates and dusts them with powdered sugar to hide some of his sins. He has to open the powdered sugar bag, and some deep horror within him hopes against hope that there is sugar in the buttercream, lest he serve buttery rocks to his dear heart. 

But he’s out of time, and Taako comes home early, and Kravitz has no way to back out. He has to barrel into it full speed ahead, with a glowing smile and an earnest heart and definitely no embarrassed shaking.

“What the fuck happened in here?” is the first thing out of Taako’s mouth, and okay, yeah, Kravitz kind of earned that one. He didn’t do a lot of mess-handling, and the kitchen looks like a willfully malicious sugar tornado has ruined all of their nice things. 

“I, um.” The words get stuck in his throat, and Kravitz’s hands go to push his hair back before he remembers that he’s covered in powdered sugar and other less savory reagents. “I made you some cupcakes for Valentine’s Day.” 

Taako squints at the plate Kravitz is presenting, which looks like it has survived a blizzard and only just barely. He squints at Kravitz, who looks like he has not survived a Fantasy Food Network war, and yet is standing here with a nervous grin and shmutz in his hair and the ugliest fucking cupcakes Taako has ever seen, sunken and lopsided and sad, and then he thinks about how Kravitz made him those ugly ass cupcakes with his own two hands, no magic, and legitimately tried, for what? Taako? To impress him? For fucking love?

Taako bursts into tears. 

Kravitz decides he’s offended his boyfriend and will immediately have to relocate planes.

“You don’t have to eat them--I’m so sorry-”

“No, I’m gonna fucking eat them! Gimme one!” Taako wipes at his face vigorously before hugging Kravitz, even though he’s yucky. “Gods, you fucking sap. You made me cupcakes? By yourself?”

Oh. Kravitz sucks in a deep breath, and his fake lungs thank him. He almost drops the cupcakes, which wouldn’t be such a terrible sin, and he hugs Taako back as best he can. 

“I love you,” he says, which is all he can say. It’s his only excuse. “I love you so much.”

“Fuck!” Taako hollers. “I love you too, you big dumb asshole! You perfect- Adonis beef!” 

Taako takes one of the cupcakes, still leaning against his beau, and he takes an enormous bite.

He has to fight to choke it down. 

“Oh my goodness, you don’t have to eat that--I’m so sorry, Taako, I never should have- I thought-”

“It’s fine-” Taako says through more tears. It’s not. It’s the worst thing he’s ever eaten, and he’s had to live off of pest rodents more than once in his long lifespan. Honestly, with a bit of seasoning, they aren’t _that_ bad. These rock solid offenses to the gods are so salty Taako can barely breathe, probably because Kravitz confused the sugar and salt, and they’re essentially constructs made by a person with only a vague idea of what a cupcake actually is. 

But Kravitz made them for him, because he’s in love? With Taako? And Taako is bawling, and Kravitz actually does drop the cupcakes, no loss, and then he starts crying, and they’re both crying and hugging each other and neither of them would ever admit to such a sappy thing, but they’d never been so in love in their whole combined centuries of existence. 

Taako wipes his face and hands over a hand-made card, an amateur sort of thing with black lace around it and hand-drawn cartoon skulls and a little raven-feather motif and Kravitz is crying again and they’re both so in love they could perish on the spot, and rather cheesily, Kravitz realizes that this is what the holiday is about. Not perfect things, or impressing each other, or even fancy food. It’s about love, really and truly, in the most earnest and hard-to-swallow-unless-it’s-yours sort of way. It’s incredible. It’s not something either of them ever thought they’d have, or deserve, or even enjoy, but they’re both happier than they can physically contain. 

They clean up the kitchen, using quite a lot of magic, and they sit down on the couch to watch some sappy movies Taako will make fun of but cry at the end over. Taako goes to get some snacks and Kravitz snuggles up with the stupid bear, a lot happier than he has been for weeks now. The anxiety is gone, forgotten in favor of the sweetest, dorkiest love he could possibly bare. Things are alright. 

“Babe, there’s something back here!” Taako calls, voice muffled by the depths of the fridge. “Shit, I think it’s chocolate? Did you buy these??”

Oh no. Kravitz vaults over the back of the couch and stumbles into the kitchen to stop him, but Taako has already opened the package and bit clear into the hideous offering, and Kravitz yelps, but Taako just grins at him. 

“Holy fuck, did you make these? This shit’s legit! Tasty as hell, here, try some-” 

And Kravitz is crying all over again, because he didn’t fuck up as badly as he thought he did, and because Taako is eating something he made and grinning, not gagging, and because Taako Loves him, for really and truly, to have and to hold, for serious. 

Taako doesn’t cry this time, but it’s a close thing, and it’s probably 80% because his mouth is full and he has something else to focus on. He still kisses Kravitz on the cheek, definitely leaving a nasty chocolate print, and Kravitz’s heart explodes with undiluted affection. 

“I love you,” he says, again, but fuck, does he mean it. 

“I, you know what, Krav, I, I love you too.” 

And they kiss, because they can’t resist. Because they’re in love, and they can’t help it. Because they’re meant to be together. Because a little bit of chocolate mouth never hurt nobody, and Kravitz doesn’t mind if he can sweep Taako up in his arms and hold him close forever and ever. Love. This is it, isn’t it?

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! This was my fiftieth fic, so we just hit a checkpoint together!


End file.
